,

Betting Strategies To Improve Your Bets

There’s never been a wider selection of betting opportunities than there are today. Whether you’re a novice punter or seasoned veteran, it’s vital to have betting strategies in place if you are serious about making money.

Like any business, online casinos and bookmakers want you as a customer. That’s why there are plenty of useful promotions available from online bookmakers. The types of offers range from cash matches on your first deposit to free slot spins when deposit and spend a certain amount of money.

Essentially there’s such a variety on offer that you’re sure to find one that suits your needs. However, unless you bet intelligently, you are unlikely to benefit from them.

Key Strategies

Data is key in betting, so it pays to have at least some basic details to hand. For example, in the 2018/19 Premier League season, 47% of games played ended in home wins, 18% as draws and 34% as away wins. There was an average of 2.82 goals per game. That statistic is up slightly on the previous Premier League season when the average goals scored per game was 2.68.

With this basic information, you can at least begin to make some informed decisions as to where you place your bets. A good one to consider, based on the stats above is ‘Over 2.5 Goals‘.

The most common full-time score in the 18/19 Premier League season was 2-0. That came in 17.6% of the time during the campaign. The most common scoreline at half-time is 0-0. That’s useful data for a variety of betting markets.

Using The Stats

You can use a simple guide for rating the match odds. Look at the home and away records of the teams over a fixed time-frame. 

For example, over a 20-match period Team A had a recent home record of 16 wins 4 draws and 0 losses.

Their opposition, Team B, had 4 wins 6 draws and 10 losses on their travels.

We could make a quick guide to true match prices by combining both sets of results.

So, for the home win we would have 16 + 10 = 26 of 40 games in total, which equates to 65%. Using the same process we can calculate the draw as 4 + 6 = 10 of 40, so 25% and the away win would be 0 + 4 = 4 of 40, or 10%.

Our fair match odds might be something around 8/15 (Home); 3/1 (Draw); 9/1 (Away). You can use this quick formula to decide whether you are getting good odds from your online bookmaker!

Alternative Betting markets

When backing the Over/Under goals market, you need to have a decent sample size. This is to see whether you have a value bet and to ensure that the figures aren’t distorted by a rogue scoreline or two (e.g. a 6-1 score result can heavily distort figures in too small a sample).

The Kelly Criterion is a good guide to determining the staking size of bets. The Kelly formula is:

BR% = (P*B) – 1 / odds – 1, where P is the probability of us winning (as a decimal), B the odds offered and BR% the percentage of the bankroll we should stake according to the Kelly Criterion.

For the more advanced, there is the Poisson Distribution is another option though it is far more complicated. It requires more work using historical data to calculate the attacking and defensive strengths of the teams. Ultimately, it arrives at the likely number of goals that will be scored in a match.

Using formulas is all well and good and statistically, over time, they do all balance out so if you bet on a 2-0 scoreline at full time, for every game, you will be right nearly 18% of the time. It also means you will lose 82% of the time!